Jack Kerouac

With a strong push from MTV, spoken-word poetry went mainstream in the mid-1990s, and Maggie Estep was its leading lady. Dressed in black, often backed by a rock band, Estep was a sassy, slightly twisted New Yorker who wrote and performed humorous, biting pieces that merged poetry with stand-up comedy. A regular at Manhattan's Nuyorican Poets Café, the center of the poetry slam movement, she was a crowd favorite for pieces with titles like "Hey Baby" and "The Stupid Jerk I'm Obsessed With." "Maggie epitomized the potent early wave of slam poetry," said Daniel Gallant, executive director of the Nuyorican Poets Café, where Estep...

With a strong push from MTV, spoken-word poetry went mainstream in the mid-1990s, and Maggie Estep was its leading lady.
Dressed in black, often backed by a rock band, Estep was a sassy, slightly twisted New Yorker who wrote and performed humorous,...

Amiri Baraka died Thursday after weeks of failing health, a family spokeperson confirmed. He was 79.
A playwright, poet, critic and activist, Baraka was one of the most prominent and controversial African American voices in the world of American letters....

This post has been corrected. See the note below.
I spent part of Wednesday afternoon at UCLA, on a panel to celebrate the 50th anniversary of John Rechy’s novel “City of Night,” newly reissued to commemorate the occasion. The book is a landmark not only...

The superhero origin story has become popular in the last few years, so it makes sense the form might also spread to stories outside the comic-book genre — like Beat generation writers. The new film "Kill Your Darlings" tells the tale of how...

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More than 40 years after his death, "On the Road" author Jack Kerouac is still making friends. "Man of Steel" star Michael Shannon and "Sopranos" actor John Ventimiglia will join a host of authors in a sold-out event Sunday...

In most modern narratives, the story of the Beats began when Allen Ginsberg first read "Howl" to rapturous audiences, when his poetic evocation of youth gone wrong and hope and rebellion and power and gay love was banned and became famous.
That...

The 2013 Fall Movie Preview is a broad snapshot of films opening through Nov. 1. Release dates and other details, as compiled by Oliver Gettell, are subject to change.
SEPT. 6
36 Saints
Two New York City detectives hunt for a serial killer targeting 36...

The 2013 Fall Movie Preview is a broad snapshot of films opening through Nov. 1. Release dates and other details, as compiled by Oliver Gettell, are subject to change.
SEPT. 6
36 Saints
Two New York City detectives hunt for a serial killer targeting 36...

Until three years ago, Bea Kozera, who died this month at age 92, did not know she played a role in American literature.
In 1947 she had an affair with a man she met on a Greyhound bus leaving Bakersfield. He was Jack Kerouac, who would go on to write...

"I can do things other people can't," the man says with becoming modesty, and can he ever. Cauterize deep wounds with a single glance, leap tall buildings in a single bound, things like that. Those rumors you've been hearing are true: Superman...

"I was 16, 17, maybe, when I spoke with Walter for the first time," Kristen Stewart is saying about director Walter Salles, whose film version of the Jack Kerouac novel "On the Road" premiered as one of the competition titles...

An eternal fountain of adolescence, Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" went through many permutations between its point of origin, 1948, and its point of notorious, divisive publication, 1957. The best description of it came from Kerouac himself, in a...

The backlash in Washington over "Zero Dark Thirty" didn't reach the box office, as Kathryn Bigelow's CIA thriller got off to an excellent start in limited release.
Playing in five theaters, the film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden grossed...

NEW ORLEANS — The cab careened past Washington Square and onto Frenchmen Street. It was close to 10 p.m., and the neighborhood was filled with locals adorned with tattoos, piercings and lots of ragged black accessories."The cab drivers call this...

Gore Vidal was impossible to categorize, which was exactly the way he liked it. The reading public knew him as a literary juggernaut who wrote 25 novels —from the historical "Lincoln" to the satirical "Myra Breckinridge" — and volumes...

Mindful that great American road trips occur in all sorts of vessels — heck, Huck rode a rickety raft — we're on a Greyhound bus heading up California's flat, slender belly. "Why?" you ask. That's a sensible question, but let us open our...